Her phone rang as she turned onto Diamond, and she pulled into the first available parking lot to answer it. It was an unknown number. “I hate answering unknown numbers,” she said to Mutt. “What?’ she said into the phone.
“You sound very, ah, suspicious, Ms. Shugak.”
“I know that ‘ah’,” she said, leaning back in her seat. “What can I do for you, Special Agent Mason?”
A smothered chuckle. “Refreshingly to the, ah, point, as always, Ms. Shugak. Are you still in town?”
“How did you know I was to begin with?”
“The medical examiner might have, ah, mentioned it.”
She was silent for a moment. “You’re here because of Gary Curley.”
A noncommittal grunt.
“Are you telling me Curley’s activities went interstate after I left the DA’s office? Is that why the FBI is calling me?”
“Could you perhaps make time to, ah, visit the local FBI office, Ms. Shugak? I believe you know our location. I’ll tell them to expect you.”
Fifteen minutes later she walked into Special Agent Mason’s office. There was no insignia on the door and the decor was the ne plus ultra in anonymity, like Erland’s only much lower end. Special Agent James G. Mason appeared to pursue that anonymity in his own personal appearance as well. His hair and suit were both regulation cut, as was his skinny tie and Rockport dress shoes. A pair of rimless glasses slid continuously down his nose and was as continuously being pushed back up with a bony forefinger. It was a habit Kate had noticed before and one that she was certain was meant to distract from the sharp intelligence in his gray eyes. “How’s Jo?” she said.
“In Shishmaref, as I understand it,” he said without missing a beat, “and after that Kivalina, St. Mary’s, and Barrow. As I understand it she’s writing a story on how climate change is hitting northwest Alaska first and hardest.” He directed his gaze at Mutt. “Hey, Mutt. We met in Adak, remember?”
Mutt took her cue from Kate and looked wary.
“Please, both of you, have a seat.” He folded his hands across his non-existent belly and did his best to look benign, but neither of the women across the desk from him was fooled. “Mr., ah, Brillo told me that he had called you in to view Mr. Curley’s remains.”
“I believe he wanted me to confirm Curley’s identity. Curley not having any family.”
He smiled briefly. “I don’t question his decision, Ms. Shugak, and in fact I am, ah, grateful that it put you on my radar again. So to speak. I understand you investigated Curley for child abuse back in the day.”
Her mouth twisted briefly into an ugly line. “He’s the reason I was hired as an investigator for the DA. The cops had been trying to bring charges against him for years and never been able to make them stick. The DA at the time got a wild hair that if he hired the department’s own investigator and tasked them to go over the evidence that the investigator might find something the cops had missed. I couldn’t but they brought me on permanent anyway.”
“You were never able to make the case?”
Kate swallowed hard to repress the old familiar nausea and hoped Mason hadn’t noticed. Mutt had, and she leaned into Kate’s side, a warm, solid, reassuring weight. “He’d pay parents to let their kids live with him, no questions asked. He was essentially Alaska’s white, no-talent answer to Michael Jackson.”
“The kids?”
“They were always so young. Some of them barely in kindergarten. They were never going to make the best witnesses. And the parents always stayed bought.”
“And always, ah, children of color.”
“Oh, yes.” A low growl began to rumble out of the very back of Mutt’s throat, and Kate took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The rumble subsided but it did not go entirely away. “Alaska Native children were particularly at risk. Especially when Curley’s Asian… providers failed him.”
Mason, tactfully, let a few minutes pass before he spoke again. “What was his history?”
“He was from California originally, the Bay area. He invested in some dot-com thing before they were a thing, and it was just Alaska’s bad luck he decided to take his money and come north.” She hesitated. “It happens a lot. Assholes like Curley look at Alaska and see how far away everything is from everything else. Especially the authorities.”
“Like Father Smith,” he said, watching her.
“Exactly like Father Smith. They figure they can do whatever they want to their families and no one will ever know. And a lot of the time they’re right. At any rate, we failed to nail Curley.” I failed, she thought.
“You are aware that he was found with a wholesale quantity of fentanyl tablets?”
“Brillo showed me. He ID’d them as fentanyl?”
“He did. Homemade.”
She was silent for a moment, thinking. “If Curley was importing them on his jet there are probably a lot more of those pills sitting around on the mountain.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“At present buried under a winter’s worth of snow, but still.”
“But still,” Mason said.
She looked at him. “Not that I’m not just delighted to see you and all, but why am I here?”
He stood up and opened the drawer of the desk, from which he took his sidearm. He holstered it. “We have obtained a warrant to search Mr. Curley’s house.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “Was he transporting those drugs across state lines?” Was Curley, she thought, transporting them across the international border?
Mason did imperturbable well. “Given your, ah, familiarity with his case, I thought perhaps you might like to accompany us. In a strictly advisory capacity, of course.”
In spite of every effort, Kate had never managed to achieve entry into Curley’s house. “Why, yes,” she said. “I believe I would.”
If Axenia’s house was a McMansion, Curley’s was the bastard offspring of a Swiss chalet and the Disney castle. There were turrets, two of them, and both had arrow slits, no doubt designed for defense in the event of an attack by Genghis Khan. The exterior was faced with stone or some kind of material made to look like it. The tops of the walls were crenelated like battlements and the front door was a massive arch of some dark-stained wood with wrought iron hinges. “Where’s the moat?” Kate said.
Curley’s surviving pocket had not included a key so they used a battering ram. The door was so solidly constructed that they had to call for additional help and a bigger ram. While waiting for it to arrive, Kate went around to the side—the back was actually built into the mountainside—and found the side door, which was easily breached with the smaller ram.
The inside reeked of too much money and too little taste. The furniture was all white leather, overstuffed in the living areas and suspended from chrome in the dining area. There was a wood-burning fireplace in nearly every room but the bathrooms, of which there were many, including a half-bath just inside each exterior door, of which they found four, and Kate wasn’t entirely certain that was the end of it. The air was toasty warm. She saw no vents, and on a hunch bent over to place her hand flat on the floor (marble downstairs, some kind of distressed wood planking upstairs). “Radiant heat,” she said in answer to Mason’s questioning look. She looked up at the twelve-foot ceilings. “I wonder what the heating bill looks like.”
Mutt’s toenails ticky-tacked across the floor as she sniffed the corners. Someone called Mason’s name and he went upstairs a broad, wooden staircase suitable only for someone in a crown or a crinoline. Kate and Mutt nosed around downstairs until she heard Mason call her name.
He was in one of the turrets, a single, round room painted a pale pink and decorated with ruffles and bows. A canopied bed sat against one wall, equidistant from a free-standing wardrobe, a schoolroom desk with attached chair, and a seating area of child-sized chairs grouped around a television mounted on the wall. The only windows were the arrow slits they’d seen from outside, filled with glass inserts that didn’t open. The doo
r had a lock on the outside but not the inside.
“And this.” Mason led the way down a hallway to the opposite turret, where a similar room was painted in pale blue and decorated by Woody from Toy Story.
Kate thought of the two children asleep in the clinic in Niniltna, and felt the bile building at the back of her throat.
“How old were the two children, ah, recovered from the wreck?” Mason said, picking up her thoughts.
She took a deep breath. This was the first time he’d mentioned the children, and there went her hope that word of them had not made it out of the Park. “The boy, kindergarten or first grade, maybe? The girl a year or so younger. Although they’re enough alike to be twins.”
“There’s nothing in his office,” someone said from the doorway. “No laptop, no pad, no phone. I had a look around and I don’t see a mailbox outside, so his snail mail went somewhere else. No landline that I can see.”
“I saw a dish on the roof,” Kate said.
Mason nodded at the other agent. “Find out who his ISP was.”
The head vanished. Mason looked at her. “Any other ideas?”
“No way did this guy clean his own house.”
“A housekeeper? Good, ah, call. We’ll check.”
“I didn’t see any near neighbors but it’s a long and winding road. Maybe a canvass of the area?”
He sighed but nodded.
She jerked her head. “Let me show you something I found downstairs.”
There was a walk-in pantry at the back of the kitchen. Three walls were given over to foodstuffs, dry, canned and bagged, and a lot of that candy, sugared cereals, and cookies. But one shelf was floor to ceiling Ziploc bags, most them quart and sandwich sized. Stacked on the floor below the shelf was a pile of put-together mailing boxes of different sizes. She picked up one and displayed it. “Small flat rate box. Costs seven, eight bucks to ship, depending on how much insurance you buy. Their motto is ‘If It Fits, It Ships.’”
“Bring it here wholesale, send it out, ah, retail,” Mason said.
“I thought most of the fentanyl coming into the US was coming from China,” Kate said.
“It is, but the Mexican cartels noticed how much money the Chinese are making at it and have begun to ramp up production and move product themselves.”
“Curley didn’t fly the stuff in from China.”
“No. And before you say it, probably not Mexico, either.”
“So we have two choices, Russia or Canada, and while I’d expect anything of Putin I have a hard time believing that a private jet could just waltz back and forth across the Bering Strait without either the USAF or the Russian Air Force noticing.”
“Agreed.”
“So. Canada?”
“It is such a, ah, short hop over the mountains,” he said apologetically.
“And by jet an equally short hop from Anchorage to Niniltna.” She turned to look at Mason. “Have you had reports of illegal fentanyl production in Canada, Agent Mason?”
“They’re called pill mills, Ms. Shugak. And yes, unfortunately. We have.”
“So they make the stuff in pill mills in the YT or BC, load them on a plane and ferry them to Niniltna. Where Curley picked them up and brought them here, broke them down into retail amounts, and passed them on to… dealers?”
“That is our, ah, working hypothesis.”
“It was a gallon bag they picked up at the site.”
“Yes.”
“Say there are, I don’t know, twenty more just like it. How many doses in a gallon bag?”
He shrugged. “Say, ten thousand. We haven’t gotten around to counting them yet.”
Kate blew out a breath. “Yeah. Okay, then. Twenty gallon bags times ten thousand tablets each equals two hundred thousand doses.” She looked up. “How often do your people think Curley was bringing in shipments?”
His answer was prompt and unequivocating. “At least twice monthly.”
“So, four hundred thousand doses total. There are only about 740,000 people in Alaska.” She gave Mason a considering look. “Some of it was for local customers, okay, but he was shipping the bulk of it overseas, wasn’t he?”
“We believe so,” he said. “Russia, Japan, and South Korea have been reporting a large uptick in street sales of imported fentanyl and oxycontin. They think it’s being routed through the US. They hadn’t zeroed in on Alaska quite yet.” He hesitated. “And we believe it will have been more than twenty. Many more.”
She crossed her arms and frowned at the floor. “I have to say, this seems awfully front line for someone like Curley. Mostly those guys don’t want to get their hands dirty.”
“Depended on how much money he needed how fast.”
“He was loaded.” She raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t he?”
“He used to be. Not so much, ah, now. He took a beating in the market downturn in oh-eight and never recovered.”
Her lip curled. “And he had such expensive habits.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s over now, right?” she said, knowing full well it wasn’t.
“Until whoever is running this operation finds someone to take his place. Far too profitable to give it up without a fight. Although I don’t imagine there are that many as suitable for this kind of work. Broke, a big house to maintain, money to buy, ah, sex slaves.”
Kate tried not to flinch at the last two words.
“Boss?”
They looked up to see an agent beckoning, and followed him to a room in the back on the ground floor. An office with a desk, a printer, a filing cabinet containing mostly personal papers to do with Curley’s taxes, living expenses, and mortgage, and on its own table, a Safescan bill counter.
Mason was admiring. “Top of the line, with a thermal printer so he’d have a hard copy to include as the shipping manifest.” He looked at Kate. “That’s always the problem with large drug trafficking operations. Handling the money.”
Stacked beneath the table were more USPS flat rate boxes, along with a box full of rolls of mailing tape, also USPS brand. “Well. At least some department of the federal government was making money off this guy.”
“I wonder how he handled postage.”
Kate thought. “Be easy enough to set up a Click-N-Ship account in a fictitious name, linked to a PO box and a credit card or a PayPal account in the same name.” She nodded at the printer. “Create the postage online, print it out, tape it on, drop the package off at the post office. Probably rotate the drop-offs through different post offices just to be on the safe side.”
“Almost foolproof.”
Mason walked out past the kitchen into the vast acreage of the living area and paused at the window. She came up behind him. It was a landscape of dull white, lead, and slate all the way across to Susitna, land, sea, and sky. On the right the mountains made an arc and on the face of one was the three hundred foot-wide star made of 350 60-watt light bulbs, lit from the Friday after Thanksgiving and which remained lit until the last Iditarod musher crossed beneath the burlwood arch in Nome in mid-March. Kate had never been quite this close to it, and until today she would have said it was one of the things she loved about Anchorage.
She stirred. “All this is very interesting, not to say alarming, Agent Mason. Why am I here?”
Mason folded his arms and contemplated the toes of his shoes for a moment. “The wreck happened in your backyard, and evidence recovered from it led directly to our presence here.” He met her eyes. “If any of this speculation is correct, Niniltna may have been the transfer point in the supply chain, and you are best placed to find any witnesses to events that may or may not support our hypothesis.”
Much as the vision of FBI agents en masse traipsing around the Park in their suits and Rockports provided her with no end of internal enjoyment, she had to acknowledge his point. “Please be specific, Agent Mason. Are you hiring me to use my entree into the Park to find said witnesses?”
“What are your fees?” She told him an
d he didn’t blink. “I’ve been allocated some, ah, discretionary funding. As of today you’re hired as a consultant—” he held up a cautionary finger “—specifically as pertains to this investigation only, Ms. Shugak.”
“Understood,” she said, blandly and, for the moment at least, truthfully. “I’m Kate, by the way.”
“Gerry,” he said. “The G is for Gerald.”
They shook on it.
They were getting into the Subaru when her phone rang. It was Jim, and just the sight of his name on her screen gave her a pleasurable thrill. She shook her head and answered. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself. Where the hell are you?”
She looked up at Curley’s house. “Camelot. With a side of the Inferno.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll explain later. What’s up?”
“Later is sooner than you think, babe. I’m on my way into town.”
“Oh?” She sternly repressed any tendency to squeal with delight. Mutt would only make fun of her. “When will you be in?”
His voice dropped an octave. “Bedtime. Be naked.”
“Promises, promises.” But she hung up with a big grin all over her face. If Mutt could have raised one eyebrow, she would have. “Oh shut up,” Kate told her, and was saved from annihilation only by the phone ringing again. This time it was Kurt. “What have you got?”
He sounded frustrated. “Come see for yourself.”
It was getting on for sunset—or as it is known in Alaska in January, about four p.m.—by the time she got to his office. She parked and Mutt raced her up the stairs to the seventh floor. They arrived at Pletnikof Investigations out of breath but pretty pleased with themselves, Kate in particular shaking off the last of the inchoate fury inspired by the tower rooms at Chez Satan. Agrifina Fancyboy, dressed today in a charcoal suit that would have appeared right at home on the runway at Chanel, with one look brought them back to a cowed sense of decorum. They went sedately into Kurt’s office and simultaneously exhaled when the door closed behind them. Kate sat in the chair across from his desk and Mutt trotted around to receive her due, in this case a strip of caribou jerky Kurt kept in his desk just for her.
No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22) Page 12
